Palestinian Media Watch's founder and director Itamar Marcus is presenting PMW's new report Fatah Votes for Terror to the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East today, Thursday March 16, in Washington D.C. The report documents that Fatah and many of the leaders who were elected to its Central Committee at the Seventh Fatah Conference openly support terror, and did so actively during the terror wave of 2015-2016.

The Seventh Fatah Conference ended in December 2016with elections for the 18-member governing body, the Fatah Central Committee. Twelve members were reelected and six new members joined the committee. In addition, Mahmoud Abbas was reelected separately as chairman, and he also has the right to appoint four additional members. This report examines Fatah's attitudes to terror during the wave of Palestinian terror 2015-2016, and focuses on the attitudes of those elected members of the Central Committee who have spoken publicly, including Mahmoud Abbas, as well as Fatah leaders who were Central Committee members during the terror wave, but were not reelected at the Seventh Fatah Conference.

This report documents how the Fatah Movement responded to individual Palestinians murdering Israeli civilians in stabbings, shootings, and car ramming attacks, during the terror wave from September 2015 to mid-2016. 40 people were murdered in these attacks (36 Israelis, 1 Palestinian, 2 Americans, and 1 Eritrean) and hundreds wounded.

The report also includes Fatah's responses to the terror on the Fatah-run TV station Awdah and its official social media.

When examining the chances for peace and whether the Palestinian Authority, with the Fatah Movement as its leading party, can be seen as a peace partner at all, there is paramount importance to the attitudes to terror by these Fatah leaders. These are the people who will be determining the policy of Mahmoud Abbas' party and through it the policy of the Palestinian Authority in the coming years. Will they lead the Palestinian people toward peace or continued animosity and terror?